I was half way across the room with my third cup of coffee when two shrill, angry voices caught my attention. They were coming from a table to my left. Two women had started to argue. I sat down and watched them out of the corner of my eye. They were both smartly dressed. In office clothes, not medical uniforms. I guessed that one was in her mid thirties, and the other no more than early twenties. Their postures suggested that the older woman had started the ball rolling. The younger one looked like she was reaching the end of her tether. She fell silent for a moment, then sprang to her feet, sending her chair skidding away behind her. She lent across the table, palms flat on its surface, her nose almost touching the other woman’s. Her voice dropped to a whisper, and for the life of me I couldn’t make out what she said. Then she turned and flounced away, almost falling into Melissa’s lap as she chose that moment to wheel into the room.
“Everything OK?” I said, as Melissa reached my table a few moments later.
“It is with me,” she said. “But what was that all about? I nearly ran that woman over.”
“I don’t know. Some kind of argument, I think. I couldn’t hear the details.”
“Damnation. I always miss the excitement. Was it a good one?”
“No. Quite tame, really.”
“Any punching?”
“No.”
“Scratching?”
“No.”
“Eye gouging?”
“None. Nothing like that. You really didn’t miss much.”
“Who was she arguing with?”
“Another woman. She’s still here. Grey cardigan, white blouse. Three tables behind you. Seven o’clock.”
Melissa looked up slightly towards the window, trying to catch a reflection in the glass.
“It must have been quite a good one,” she said. “That woman’s hand is still shaking. Ten quid says she’ll spill her tea.”
I didn’t reply.
“I wonder what they were rowing about?” she said. “Work? What do you think? Football? Or maybe a man?”
“No idea,” I said.
“I bet some guy’s at the heart of it. An office romance. Never a good idea.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Well, have you ever heard of one working out well?”
“Actually, no,” I said. “Although, it’s not a field I have much experience in.”
“Me neither,” she said.
“So, tell me, how did your phone calls go?”
“Oh, OK. Frustrating, more than anything. I had to follow up on a few things. I made some enquiries before I arrived here, and a few of the responses aren’t coming through quickly enough. I had to light fires under a couple of people.”
I looked out of the window for a moment, trying not to take her bait.
“You want to know what we’re doing here, don’t you?” she said.
“No,’ I said. “I honestly don’t have the slightest interest.”
Melissa tipped her head to one side, like she’d done in the garden, and waited a few seconds before saying anything else.
“Do they have good sandwiches here?” she said.
“A couple looked quite reasonable,” I said. “There was a prosciutto and goats’ cheese panini. That was probably the best of the bunch.”
“OK, then,” she said. “You grab us each one of those. We’ll eat. Then we have an important meeting to go to. But before that, there’s something I want to show you, downstairs. It’ll help you make sense of everything.”
Melissa told me to hit the button for the basement, and when the door opened I saw that instead of a single corridor as there’d been at ground level, we now had a choice of four.
“It’s like Hades, only with colour-coding,” she said as she emerged into the stale air, nodding towards the broad stripes that were painted on the pale green walls. “I mean, as in the underworld, not the god of the dead.”
“I don’t care about the dead,” I said. “Just as long as there are no three-headed dogs down here.”
“Don’t worry,” she said, starting off down the corridor to our left. “There are no dogs of any kind. Except maybe some Guide Dogs, and you hardly need worry about them. So, are you coming? It’s this way. We want the purple route.”
I caught up with her and took hold of the chair’s handles, but didn’t need to actually push. She was happy to keep the speed up on her own, running her hands rhythmically around the rim of the wheels. The corridor she’d chosen was long and straight. The light grey on the floor was peeling in places, allowing the concrete to show through, and the walls were plain except for the slightly wavy navigational line that ran all the way down the right hand side. A mess of cables and ventilation ducts dangled from angled brackets above our heads, along with a row of caged-in fluorescent lights. They were evenly spaced, one every ten feet, so there was no relief from their harsh glare.
As I trudged forward I noticed that one of Melissa’s wheels was developing a squeak every time it turned. She was going to need some oil pretty soon if she didn’t want to announce her arrival everywhere she went, and I was still wondering where she could get some when I realised the smell of the air was changing, too. The stagnant odour near the lift was gradually being replaced by something with a sharper, harder edge.
“What is that?” I said. “It smells like chlorine.”
“I think it is chlorine,” Melissa said.
“Where’s it coming from?”
“The swimming pool, I expect.”
“Which swimming pool?”
“The hospital’s.”
“I didn’t know it had one. Where is it?”
“Round the next corner.”
“But wait,” I said, taking a moment to make sure I had my bearings straight. “Wouldn’t that bring us up into the street?”
“If we went up,” she said. “Yes, it would.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“The pool’s down here. Underground. Between the hospital and the nurses’ home.”
“I didn’t even know there was a nurses’ home.”
“Oh, yes. That big, ugly, modern building on the opposite side of the road. The pool’s actually bang in the middle, twenty feet below street level.”
“Are you sure?”
“I am. And just think. All those stressed out office workers heading home every evening. What would they do if knew they were a few yards above a horde of student nurses in tiny little bikinis?”
“Do people use it much?” I said, trying to imagine how it would feel to be in a pool of water beneath one of the busiest commuter streets in London.